Why are so many four-letter words actually four letters?

A disclaimer: I'm going to be spelling out some of the most notorious, and common, four-letter words, over and over, so if you don't want to see them, tune out now.



Okay, here goes: fuck, shit, cunt, cock, dick, damn, hell, piss, crap . . . and what else?



What do these common "four-letter" words have in common?



The anwswer is that they really are four-letter words. Why would that be?



(There are many other curse words, of course, but most are just combinations and adaptations of these basic four-letter words. More on that later.)



Curses of old were often lengthy -- see any of Shakespeare's plays -- and much more eloquent.
Somewhere along the way they lost their creativeness and orginality and got a lot shorter, devolving from whole phrases -- "you thieving son of a rapscallion", "you conniving strumpet" -- to single syllables spat out so often and so unthinkingly that most of us aren't nearly as shocked as we're supposed to be when we hear them. [See a previous essay about not over-using and otherwise abusing swear words.]


As to their nowadays being so much shorter, I can only guess at the reason. Maybe it's because all those words have a certain innate insult to them, like a slap. They're very abrupt and call attention to themselves. They're also easy to remember, even by those of us with limited language skills and even more limited vocabularies.

Moreover, they all reduce something complicated to something simple. "Fuck" means a lot more than "I disrespect you" or "I can't think of another word to use here". "Shit" gets disrespected as meaning not worth anything when, in its literal sense, it's a natural by-product of living and feeds lots of tiny organisms that share our planet. "Cunt" is an astonishingly crude reference to a woman, reducing her to a single body part -- and making even that sound crude. In every case, someone is reducing a complicated issue down to a single-syllable word, the easier to dismiss it.

"Cock" probably originated with men who were seeking a macho-sounding word to describe that part of them that caused them the most anxiety but that also produced their greatest pleasure. Being guys, we'd better label it so we can sound like we're not serious when we talk about it. Cock. Dick. You'll notice that both sound distinctly masculine, sort of like bragging -- unlike the aforementioned "cunt" used to demean a woman. (More evidence that men have been in control of language way too long.)

Most of the longer, multi-syllabic curse words, as mentioned before, seem to be variations on the basic four-letter ones: motherfucker (probably the nastiest-sounding), cocksucker, bullshit, etc.
And there are, to be sure, some five-letter examples, namely whore and bitch and the less foul tramp. Did you notice that all of those refer to women? So what do we call a male who is sexually promiscuous? Stud? Gigolo? Nothing remotely as insulting as whore or bitch or tramp.
Maybe bastard? It certainly is jarring but has more to do with a man's attitude and actions -- often toward women -- than with his unseemly sexuality. Apparently men are supposed to be kind of randy, while women are expected to tamp down their desires.

Hmmm . . .

Anyway, maybe it's time we upgrade our curse words. One of the most potentially powerful curse words, goddamn, used to be two words and referred to being condemned by The Almighty -- powerful indeed. Now it's just a throwaway word like the others. Consider the difference between just "goddamn" by itself, as an adjective in front of almost any other word, and the old-time "May God damn you to hell!" Whoa! The latter has some legs, don't you think?

So let's buckle down and come up with some new curse words -- or just recycle some previous ones that have undeservedly fallen out of favor. Our language will be the better for it -- and we'll all sound a lot smarter.

Any ideas, you insolent daughters of whoredogs, you scheming sons of jackals? I could go on, but so could you. It just takes a little research and a pinch more of imagination, you spawns of Satan, you offspring of reptiles!

Being God is a good gig.

Suppose you control your company, down to the least employee. You have the absolute say on what's what and what's not. Now suppose that something goes wrong --an employee screws up and wreaks havoc. Maybe somebody is hurt or even dies. Who's to blame?

Well, you'd think it would be you, since you hired this employee and were supposed to be monitoring his or her progress and behavior. You messed up and are responsible, right?

Ordinarily yes, but not if you're God.

If you're God, you absolve Yourself of all responsibility.

How is it You get to cop that plea?

Simple: free will.

It's a great loophole You created for Yourself way back when. You create the people and set them loose in the world, but give them the ability -- sort of -- to make choices for themselves. "Sort of" because You don't make them all uniformly smart enough to make those choices. Some of Your creations You make stupider, some smarter, but You hold them all to the same standard. If they blow it, it's their fault entirely, none of Your own.

If that employee messed up, it was his own fault entirely. You had nothing to do with it. Fire him and be done with it. Hire somebody else, right? Only try to hire somebody smarter next time.
But wait -- that would be You doing the hiring. Hmm . . .

Let's back up. You are the Creator. You made everything, including all these humans. Aren't You, then, responsible for all their mistakes? What's missing here? A sense of fair play?

What's missing is our very human interpretation of God. We humans assume, at least some of us, that there is an all-powerful and all-knowing super-human who exists outside our own existence who made us all possible and laid down laws we were supposed to follow -- in the Bible, for instance, or the Koran or wherever -- but Who ducks out when things go bad. When the tidal wave hits, or the hurricane, or the tornado, He's 'm nowhere to be found.

It was God's will, the believers say. He lifts us up, he lets us down. Who are we to doubt?

But some of us humans question that kind of thinking. I mean, these big storms come of their own accord, sparing none. The homes of the righteous and the sinners are swept away alike.
Shouldn't the true believers be spared?

Well, no. Weather is weather, and if He ordained it, it was bound to happen, and woe to you if you didn't have flood insurance. He wasn't looking out for you and your family, and you need to get used to that fact. It may or may not be true that God created us, but it's highly unlikely that He considers each of us individually. Think of Santa Claus. Didn't you, at some point, realize that he couldn't possibly deliver gifts to all the Christian houses in the world in a single night? It was a great story, a shared myth, that we knew wasn't true, but we keep it alive for our kids because it keeps them innocent.

We want to believe in God for the same reasons: We want to think we're special and that if we've been good, He will reward us -- not with candy but with an afterlife -- and so we go through the same kinds of rituals in church every Sunday. But while we're thanking God for bringing us prosperity, we don't blame him for all the useless deaths in wars around the world or the suffering of so many people in countries we can't even point to on a map.

Why is that?

Very simple. We don't want to offend God. We don't want to accuse Him of allowing such misery. We're afraid that if we blame Him, in word or deed, He will smite us, as in the Old Testament, when He was a wrathful god, so much nastier than the one Jesus introduced us to. But we don't trust Jesus. He was a good guy, forgiving us for almost everything, but we still remember his Father, that irritable deity who slew whole tribes who didn't believe.

In the end, we really don't know what to think or what to believe. We're stranded here on Planet Earth with limited intelligence and just hopes to go on. Surely this isn't all, right? Surely this miserable life I've lived -- or a good life -- isn't the final meaning of existence?

Surely there's more.

Well, maybe. Time will tell.

In the meantime, if I had to pick a job for myself, it would be God.

All the credit, none of the blame.

A good gig.

None of this means that I don't think some extra-sensory intelligence is responsible for all that we see and experience: it's just that I don't claim to know what that might be. I welcome its existence! Reveal yourself to me, angel or demon or spirit -- or God!

Until you do, as Joni Mitchell sang in one of her songs, I'll be in the bar. Make it a double.

Shooting guns is fun.

We're all divided on the issue of whether or not private citizens like you and me should own guns for our own in-house use. And what kinds of guns. Should we -- you and me -- be allowed to have a high-powered rifle or a semi-automatic handgun? A machine gun that spews bullets at many rounds per second? A bazooka that shoots a mini-warhead?

Why would we need such weapons?

Yada, yada, yada. We've heard it all before. Gun control and licensing and all that. Liberals vs. conservatives. My own thinking is that if you own a gun that is meant mainly for military use, you ought to register it just to keep it from slipping into the hands of evil-doers. Let's keep track of where those military-style weapons are, for our own safety. I mean, you don't want someone holding up a bank to be sporting an AK-47 he stole from your house, right? He could shoot everyone in the bank and get away in seconds. And you'd be left wondering -- was that mine?
And the cops might show up with questions.

But that's not what I want to talk about, which is this: Shooting guns is fun.

Most of us who have shot guns were introduced to the .22 caliber rifle or a shotgun or maybe both. The former is used to dispatch squirrels -- or, more humanely, for target practice -- and the latter is mostly used to shoot birds out of the sky: ducks or pheasants or even geese. Sport shooting, as they call it. Larger-caliber rifles are needed to bring down elk.

The twenty-two delivers a bullet on an accurate trajectory over fairly short distances and doesn't sound too loud or kick back on your shoulder. A shotgun, on the other hand, of whatever caliber, disturbs your ear and spreads its pellets over a wider range, and does indeed whack your shoulder hard. (The bigger the caliber, the harder the whack. I once had the opportunity to shoot a double-barrel whatever and declined.)

The guns criminals usually use, for urban street crimes, are often small-caliber pistols -- yes, the .22 -- that are easily concealed. After all, if you're holding someone up at close range, you don't need the bullet to travel very far. A more powerful pistol - a .45, for instance -- obviously does even more damage but is as easily concealed. The more daring criminals use shotguns whose barrels have been sawed off, meaning that the distribution of death-dealing iron pellets is wider and at even shorter range but no less lethal. The very worst, the gangs, have fully-automatic guns (machine guns) that often out-shoot the cops.

But back to my premise: Shooting guns is fun.

When I was a kid growing up in Texas, I was introduced to the .22 rifle, and to its more powerful neighbor, the 30-30, and they were really fun to shoot. They're one step up from the pellet rifle your dad bought you, which was one step up from your first BB gun. With the .22, you launch a metal projectile over some distance, aimed at a target, maybe a deer but likely as not just a paper version of a human, and it's up to you and your eye-finger coordination whether you score a hit or not. It's kind of amazing to think that, with the pull of your trigger finger, you can launch a precisely-honed piece of metal through the air, at such speed, and maybe actually hit something. The bow and arrow on steroids, in a sense.
A 30-30 does the same but with greater distance and accuracy but not much kickback. If you want to own one rifle, for protection or to deter predators on your property, I'd go for the 30-30 over the .22. More fire power, but still not much kickback.

I'm not a student of military history, so I don't know when guns were invented or got popular, but I can say that warfare before them was not demonstrably more humane. Can you imagine charging into an enemy line of soldiers with a sword or a spear? Or an ax? What must that have been like? You either had to kill some human face-to-face or be killed yourself, by slashing and chopping and -- you get the picture. Ouch!

The invention of the gun probably humanized battle -- yes, I see the irony -- to the extent that it eliminated the need for such immediate contact with someone you wanted to kill or who wanted to kill you. It was finally possible to dispatch your enemy at long distance. The bullet, propelled from a gun, made it possible to kill your enemy without knowing who he was, without looking him in the face, which seems to me a less traumatic way of killing someone.

Of course much shooting in battle is blind: just point your gun and and hope you hit someone, right? And hope the other guy is doing the same. But that also means that your own chance of being killed or maimed goes up, as you never know who is aiming at you at any given moment or just shooting his gun in your general direction. And if your head is up, oops!

The rifle, and then the machine gun, and finally artillery -- big shells launched for miles onto targets determined by guys at maps (now at computers) -- de-personalized combat but didn't make it less lethal or traumatic. A horrible wound is still a horrible wound. A life lost or ruined at long distance is still a life lost or ruined. A family is still left distraught. War is hell. Duh!

But here's another twist. The invention of the rifle -- and, to some extent, the handgun -- made possible what we now know as hunting (of wild game) and target-shooting. And we all know they've gained in popularity, right? There are millions -- yes, millions -- of guys, but not all guys, who apply for hunting licenses every year. Many more of us own guns just for the love of shooting them.

Guns are here to stay. Hey, once we've invented something that appeals to us, there's no going back, right? Once we invented guns, we were doomed to always have guns. And once the war was over -- this particular one anyway -- we were stuck with all those weapons we created to fight an enemy but that now ordinary people wanted to use, too.

I once shot a grenade-launcher in Viet Nam. It's an odd weapon, kind of like a mortar but looking like a rifle and shooting a shell not quite as destructive but almost. It made almost no noise -- kind of a whump --but launched an explosive that landed almost exactly where I thought it would. I got high-fives from my buds. But that grenade, if it had fallen on a village, might have killed a woman and her children I had never seen and didn't even know existed. To me it was like a video game of the future that I couldn't imagine at that time (the late Sixties). Scores on a board, not even a screen. My direct hit. End of discussion. Or the beginning of one.

Once you've unleashed weapons, it's really hard to put them back into Pandora's Box. We may or may not succeed in confining nuclear warheads to responsible countries, but for sure we'll never lock those death-dealing machine guns and rocket launchers up for good. That evil genie is out of that particular box and won't be put back in.

Which brings us back to the question of what to do about all those guns that exist among us, the odinary citizens. We can try to ban them -- running up against the NRA at every point - or just learn how to use them to defend ourselves and own up to owning them. Guns are kind like insurance: we can have them but may never need them. But once they're in your house or mine, we're responsible for them. Keep them locked up, at least those you don't need right away for protection. And don't let your kids know where the key is.

In the meantime, they really are kind of fun to shoot. Even the machine gun. When I was much younger and in Advanced Infantry training -- was I really there? -- I qualified as Expert on the M-60 machine gun. It was fun to shoot! I mowed down those targets with ease!

I don't think it's a mistake to take your kid out to the range to learn how to shoot a rifle. Hey, you can't malign guns if you don't know anything about them, right? Pay your money, get a certain number of targets, and shoot away. It's really kind of fun, if noisy.

Most of us won't graduate to weapons of mass destruction, but we'll always want to shoot guns. Just like we wanted to shoot arrows or throw spears in an earlier time. To kill game, yes. To kill each other, probably. Arrows were inaccurate, as were spears. Even those big catapults that sent stones or explosives over the walls of fortresses were pretty much hit or miss.

Nowadays lots of us like to shoot guns just for the thrill of sending something, with accuracy, at long distance at something, be it an unsuspecting animal or just a target.

I vote for the target, but I understand the impulse to kill, whether for food or to win a war.

I'm working on that. My dark side. Let's all work on it, okay?

The penis is a blessing and a curse.

Men have penises for two reasons: to ejaculate and to pee.



Not very romantic but true. And the two functions are mutually exclusive: if the penis is relaxed, it can pee, but if it's erect, it can't. Nature is so right about this: you don't want an aroused male peeing into his partner. Have I grossed you out yet? Sorry. Facts is facts.

The penis is a strange, but totally natural, appendage. It hangs off the front of all of us males. The first time we're aware of it is when we learn to pee. The second time we're aware of it is when, for no apparent reason except maybe we're thinking about some girl we like, it stiffens. For a boy of twelve or thirteen, that's brand new, exciting, something we'd heard about but hadn't actually experienced. Here we are, barely even a teenager, with this organ we'd always associated with going to the bathroom suddenly standing up by itself.

Whoa! What's that all about?

Unfortunately, young men don't get much counseling at this point. I certainly never heard anything except from older boys who were winking and snickering and making lewd comments about girls they knew. My parents didn't tell me anything. Did yours? I mean, it didn't take me long to make the connection to girls, but I had no idea what to do next. I just knew I wanted to poke my penis into some girl but wasn't exactly sure how to do it or even if she'd want me to.



And according to women I've talked to, they were feeling the same urges I was. They probably knew more about their bodies than I did about mine, but the message was the same: have sex!

rges, just like I was, and maybe they knew more about their bodies than I did about mine, but maybe not. Parents, in any age, aren't good at discussing sex with their kids. It seems like such an adult thing, but if we think about it, we were all young teens once, too, and excited and confusedin equal proportions. Still, once we've discovered sex, we consider it such a personal and private thing that we don't want to discuss it with anyone, certainly not our kids who need most of all to hear the truth from us.



All we knew back in those early days of attraction was to hook up with each other and, at some point, have sex. The girls were at more risk -- pregnancy outside marriage being a big no-no back then -- and the boys, who took no responsibility for this magic tool they'd just discovered, pleaded ignorance. We were all flying blind.

Nowadays young women are much more familiar with the penis and all its wiles. They know that a young man aroused is out of his mind and not to trust anything he says. He's a victim of the biology that commands him to spread his seed far and wee (as the Scottish say). He's not to be believed no matter how sincere he sounds. (Jerk him off with your hand and he'll regain his senses. Sorry to be so blunt, but it's true. Or else throw some cold water on him and talk to him later.)

To make matters worse, the penis continues to perform its reproductive function way beyond the time that it serves any useful purpose. An eighty year old man can still get an erection and presumably ejaculate into a girl of any age -- even impregnate her --but should he? We've all heard stories of old men who sire children long after they're able to take care of them and of young women forced to have sex with geezers.


Why doesn't it ever shut down?

I can't speak for women, but I'd bet there's a point when they do turn off the sex machinery -- not totally but as a major life force -- and start to think more about talking with each other and enjoying their children, etc. Sex got them the man they're with, and children -- if they had any -- and it's still enjoyable but not a main focus of their lives.





Which, of course, is why women should rule the world. They're much more inclined to take care of who they've given birth to, while men are still out there trying to get more immediate pleasure from women they hardly know. (Think Bill Clinton, President of the United States, who almost lost his lofty position over a blow-job from a chunky 25-year-old.)




Why?




Because the penis has a life of its own. It doesn't pay attention to admonitions not to lust after this or that woman (or man, but I'm not getting into that). Richard Pryor had a very funny routine about just this subject -- his penis having a life of its own -- going against all his better judgment, whispering in his ear, egging him on. It's like the serpent from Eden, getting otherwise good men into all kinds of trouble from the beginning of time.



Men are simple creatures. Some are kind, some are not. Some are athletic, some are not. Some are brave, some are not. But they all are slaves to ther penises.

A man's penis starts as just something he pees out of but later becomes an appendage that can build his ego or wreck it -- along with his career and his marriage.



Boys start looking at each others' penises from the first time they share a shower room in P.E. in junior high or high school. Nothing hidden in the shower room. It's pretty clear, pretty early, who has a big one or a little one. And anyone who has ever watched a porno knows that the men in those films have huge penises. One -- belonging to an actor who died of AIDs -- was measured at a foot long when erect. I think most women -- besides porn babes -- know that the average man's erect penis is half that at best. But do you see why most men worry that we won't measure up, so to speak? We just hope that you haven't been with men who have those huge dongs and that you'll love us for our good qualities -- and will keep wanting to have sex with us.



But the most discerning women know that it's not the size of the tool but how it's used and that having someone kiss you before and halfway through the sex act, and really kiss you, makes size immaterial. (Or at least that's what I want to believe.)

I love that a pill was discovered that let men having trouble "getting it up" overcome that problem, as a man has absolutely no control over what his penis will or will not do at any given time. He can be with an absolutely lovely woman and not "respond". It's a mystery. But if a simple and single pill solves that problem, why not? And God bless the inventors!

Women's parts are beyond my imagining, but the penis is something I'm familar with. And, at the same time, I don't understand it. Looked at in its flaccid state, it just hangs there, like a coat on a rack or an elephant's trunk. But once pumped up with blood, it's something else altogether, a force looking for a matching force, almost a mind in itself, knowing what it needs to do without any further thought from me or my brain. I'm assuming it's the same for the woman, or else this explosive thing called sex would never happen. There must be a point at which men and women both lose control, right?

Once sex is over, the penis gets small again and becomes again just a flexible hose to pee out of. Not so romantic, huh? What happens to the female sex organs is probably much the same. I would guess the tissues and muscles shrink back to normal, and there are dishes to be done. Or yoga. Or a night out with the girls.

So think of the penis as a dual-function tool but not a multi-function one. There is not a third purpose I can think of.

It's also, as I've said, the blessing and curse of many a man. It can be your pride and joy or your ultimate letdown (no pun intended). I mean, consider this: a woman can have sex even when she doesn't want it (think lubricants), but a man can't. I suspect some domestic violence has resulted from men who couldn't get it up. (Voila Viagra!)

All that said, it's still kind of amazing how nature put this all together.

When did the weather become news?

When I was kid watching early television, the weather report was maybe two minutes long. The guy -- always a guy in those days -- stood before a chart that told what the highs and lows of the next day or two would be and whether it might rain or snow. He told us what we needed to know and made his exit.

So when did weather get to be its own distinct segment of the news half-hour? Break it down: there's local news, then national and international news, then weather, then sports, then some other story of interest. When did weather start to compete with news and sports for air time?

I actually remember a moment -- but can't place it in time -- when I thought that the news had changed in its presentation. It seemed more chatty, the newscasters sitting behind desks like Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show, bantering about this and that, leading into the weather and sports. So suddenly the weather person had a spot that was much longer than before, and he spent the time, as he/she does now, showing maps of the entire nation, with graphics depicting
wind vectors, etc. Maybe even tracking hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico. Anything to fill that extra time.

At the end of the weather segment, the essential information was shown: how hot or cold the next day and maybe the day after would be, rain or no, snow or no, etc. Those of us who have watched too much TV knew then, and know now, to tune in for the last minute of the weather segment to find out what we really want to know: what's the weather tomorow.

And this inordinate fascination with weather is not the result of The Weather Channel, which many of us storm-lovers like to watch. No, it seems to have been a conscious decision on the part of TV companies to give weather a more important role in the nightly news program. When did that start, and why?

I can think of a couple of reasons. One, reporting the weather is cheap. A few slideshows, a Powerpoint chart or two, and voila! Two, we're all concerned with the weather. It affects all our lives. (But that doesn't explain why we're willing to sit through five minutes of national and even international weather before we get to what we want to hear. Or maybe it does: once we're tuned into the weather, we tend to sit there waiting for the local forecast. We all do it, right?)

The weather is truly a phenomenal backdrop for all human activity. It's also why we're here at all. For the most part, we take it for granted, given where we live, thinking it more or less predictable. That's why we turn on the TV to check the weather, just to be sure all is as it should be. We want to know how to dress, or how to dress our kids, tomorrow.

Sometimes, though, the weather kicks up and becomes a news story in itself. Hurricanes and tornados and floods and massive snowstorms are newsworthy, wherever they strike, and we all love/hate to see the coverage, whether it's where we live or somewhere else.

For the most part, though, weather follows predictable patterns: windy and wet in spring, hot in summer, cool in fall, cold in winter, etc. What most of us want when we turn on the weather on TV is reassurance that nothing weird is about to happen, and it only takes a minute or so to tell us that.

God bless all you weather men and women for doing your best to put on a show for us -- hey, you've got those minutes to fill -- but please just tell me what the skies have to offer me tomorrow and then say goodnight.

Sorry that it's your full-time job and that I'm suggesting it be made part-time (a piece of an hour a night for five nights a week is part-time), but I think the role of TV weather person has been over-rated for a long time. The weather is the weather. For 99% of the time, it ain't news. News is what's happening all around the world every day, and we know less of that because of the attention paid to the weather.

Less weather, more news.

I don't get opera.

It's kind of a shameful thing to say, since opera has been around for centuries and I'll likely be here for just a few more decades. I'm obviously at fault. My apologies to all the composers and singers who have kept this art form going all these years.

Still, I don't get it. Or maybe I should say that I get its enduring popularity among an elite group of music fans, but I don't personally get it. Them. Operas. From what I can tell, they consist of pretentious musicals, usually in another language, that showcase extreme singing.

Opera is, so far as I can tell, for afficionados of the human voice.

Those of us who may have been trained to sing that way or those of us who wish we had been. Or those of us with an "ear" that I don't possess, and I don't rule that out. For people like me, opera is an art form that exists pretty much in a foreign language, with stories we may or not know but can't recall, but with those magnificent voices we can admire but not much enjoy.

In an age when the music drowns out the voices at concerts, opera does celebrate the voice above the music. I'll give it that. But who recalls the lyrics? Can't you remember -- and relate to -- more words from an Eagles or Beatles song than from your favorite opera?

Most of us can recall words to Broadway songs and may even treasure the voices of the actors and actresses. More so, I dare to say, than we do the roles and voices of the best operatic singers, whose voices soar above what we think is normal hearing range. Barbara Streisand sounds powerful until you hear Beverly Sills. Even Roy Obison can't compete with Pavaroti.

But here's the catch: For most of us, those voices are the voices of angels, not meant for the rest of us, who listen to Springsteen and Joni Mitchell and Michael Jackson.

And why is that? Because we want to be addressed in a language we understand, by singers who are paying attention to the word instead of to their high notes. Opera needs to ground itself if it's to succeed. It has to find a way to bring those towering voices down to a level we ordinary types are comfortable with -- or else put them into a context that makes sense.

Opera is all about pretention -- in the best sense -- but more and more we're all becoming practical people who like to think of ourselves as connected and real, whether we are or not. We don't want to waste our time on rehashes of times and styles gone by. Give us something new.

Is opera up for that? Time will tell.